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Lower Standards in Schools: Preschool Edition

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:23:00 EDT

The new report from the National Center for Education Statistics calls into question whether we need a new $8 billion federal investment in early education challenge fund or whether we need to be spending scarce taxpayer resources on fixing the schools.

Today the New York Times reports on a new study from the National Center for Education Statistics that examines the rigor of proficiency standards from one state to another.

In the study, researchers compared the results of state tests and the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2005 and 2007, identifying a score on the national assessment that was equivalent to each state’s definition of proficiency.

The study found wide variation among states, with standards highest in Massachusetts and South Carolina. Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee had standards that were among the lowest.

What do Georgia, Oklahoma and Tennessee have in common besides setting a very low bar for proficiency for their kids? They all have what advocates consider to be gold-standard state-run preschool programs. Georgia and Oklahoma have universal programs.

There is a huge disconnect between these states spending billions in taxpayer funds on early education and then being in the very bottom for proficiency standards for 4th and 8th graders in math and reading in the nation. What's the point?

And it gets much worse! Not only do these states score very low when compared to federal benchmarks and other states, they have actually lowered their standards between 2005 and 2007.

Oklahoma is the poster child for high-quality universal preschool. Unfortunately, this supposed investment in high quality does not include having high standards for students once they enter elementary school. Oklahoma is perhaps the worst offender for gaming the state system and lowering proficiency rates for 4th and 8th graders so that more of them would appear proficient under the No Child Left Behind requirements for proficiency in reading and math. In fact, Oklahoma was one of three states that lowered the proficiency standards in all measured subjects and grade levels from 2005 to 2007. Georgia and Tennessee were among the 15 states that lowered proficiency standards for some of their tests in math and reading in fourth and eighth grade.

In addition, both Georgia and Oklahoma score below the national average on the just- released 2009 NAEP assessment for 4th and 8th grade math, which is considered the nation's benchmark for student achievement:

The average scale score in the nation for 4th grade math on the 2009 NAEP was 239; Georgia scored 236 and Oklahoma scored 237.
Similarly, the average scale score in the nation for 8th grade math was 282; Georgia scored 278 and Oklahoma scored 276.

The bottom line is that the two states in the nation with huge financial commitments to universal preschool for over a decade now have the lowest expectations for K-12 students in terms of grade-level proficiency and they continue to score below average on the nation's benchmark for student achievement.

Should the federal government really be investing more money to scale-up Oklahoma-style preschool programs that have not improved big-picture outcomes for the states that have already made these types of investments? Fix the schools, rather than spending billions more on the hope that early education can somehow compensate for low expectations in K-12 schools.

Obama Takes the Easy Out: Leaves Thousands of DC Children Behind

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:29:00 EDT

As the Associated Press reports:

President Barack Obama wants to keep paying for private-school vouchers for students receiving them in the District of Columbia, an administration official said Wednesday.

Obama is proposing to spend $12.2 million for the 2010-2011 school year to continue the program for about 1,700 kids. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the proposal has not been made public.

The president would like to continue the funding until all the students participating in the program graduate from high school. He would not let new students into the program, the official said.

See Reason.tv on Obama and the DC Voucher program and how Obama promised to support programs based on evidence and not politics. This makes it clear that for Obama teacher union politics will always win.

As Jay Greene points out:

On the one hand, this is a victory for the voucher advocates and shows that their efforts have been effective. On the other hand, this is a clever political move for Obama that allows him to kill the DC voucher program without paying the political price of denying low-income kids access to a program that the official evaluation has deemed beneficial. Just because he’s not ripping this opportunity out of the hands of the existing 1,700 students doesn’t mean that he’s not ripping it out of the hands of every future student who could benefit from it.

And my favorite picture from yesterday's rally (also from Dr. Greene) from the hundreds of kids that are not grandfathered in to the successful voucher program:

NCLB is NOT Closing Achievement Gap

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:57:00 EDT

As Sam Dillon at the New York Times reports:

The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W. Bush’s frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

Although Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s.

In conclusion, billions in federal spending has not improved scores for high school students or improved the achievement gap over the last thirty years. President Obama continues to act as if the federal government can spend its way to higher student performance. I remain skeptical that the next $100 billion will do the trick.

Seventeen Year Olds Show No Improvement on Nation's Report Card

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:02:00 EDT

This week the National Center for Education Statistics released the 2008 Long-Term Trend Report Card. The report found some progress for 9 and 13 year olds but 17 year old performance remains flat since the early 1970s in reading and math despite large increases in per-pupil spending and billions invested in education reform strategies such as Title 1 for disadvantaged students, No Child Left Behind, and early education. While improvement in the early grades is promising, to date it has not led to improvement at the end of students' education careers. The bottom line is that by 2008, we have seen cohorts of students who made improvements in earlier years reach the high school testing category. These earlier improvements have not been sustained with older students.

Here is what the NAEP Long Term Trends reports about students at the end of their education career:

At age 17, the average score in mathematics in 2008 was not significantly different from the scores in 2004 and 1973.
At age 17, the average reading score in 2008 was higher than in 2004 but not significantly different from that in 1971.

This evidence again demonstrates that although we have doubled education spending in real dollars in the last thirty years and spend more money on education than any other industrialized nation, in the end we have not improved outcomes for students at the end of their long stint in public education.

Schoolhouse Crock Part II: Education Stimulus Cash in Exchange for Data

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:53:00 EDT

Call it No Child Left Behind version 2.0. Yesterday Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced that the second wave of stimulus funds, approximately $16 billion would be tied to schools reporting more data.

As the New York Times reports:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the nation’s governors on Wednesday that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education aid provided under the economic stimulus law, he wants new information about the performance of their public schools, much of which could be embarrassing. . ..

To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information. The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education. It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college. Such information, Mr. Duncan’s letter said, “will reveal both strengths and underlying challenges.”

Yes, just like the data that states were required to report under No Child Left Behind (NCLB)proved to be embarrassing. From NCLB data reporting requirements, we learned that thousand of schools are low-performing and that low-income and minority student have low levels of proficiency in reading and math.

Yet, these same states that report that “transparent” data under NCLB continue to get billions in federal aid. So, I’m a little skeptical that requiring yet more data from states, as if we didn’t already know what the problem is and where the low-performing schools are located, will just be more of the same.

We have reams of independent reports that reveal exactly the kind of information Secretay Duncan is requesting. Right now I could go to the Fordham Foundation and find out how states proficiency rates compare to proficiency rates on the NAEP, the nation’s benchmark for student achievement. Right now I could find out from every state the number of students that must take remedial coursework in college.

All the federal government is doing is requiring governors to report to the feds what we already know. There is no word on requiring actual changes in student performance in exchange for the money. If states aren’t embarrassed enough to change their behavior already, reporting that 100 percent of teachers are rated as competent hardly seems like the data point that is going to do the trick. Like the No Child Left Behind the stimulus bill does not require actual change before states receive the stimulus money.

The bottom line is states may be more embarrassed, but kids will remain in failing public schools and we will have spent another $100 billion.

I wrote about the ineffectiveness of the No Child Left Behind and how states and schools game the system here, here, and here.

Differences Between Obama's Education Speech And His Adminstration's Actions

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:30:00 EDT

My new column looks at President Obama's recent education speech, which had some good rhetoric that would appeal to those of us interested in seeing some real education reforms. The president endorsed the expansion of innovative charter schools, performance pay for teachers, and the elimination of ineffective teachers. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any real legislative action planned on any of those items:

Most of the reform policies that Obama mentions, from charter schools to performance pay, are completely missing from the actual legislative agenda.

Charter schools received almost no funding from the stimulus package and there was no requirement for states to remove destructive charter school caps in exchange for billions. Similarly, while he plans to fund a few teacher incentive pilot programs, President Obama missed the opportunity to tie the billions in new federal education dollars to outcomes that could result in serious personnel reform.

Mr. Obama has also remained silent about the children who have escaped Washington, DC,’s failing public schools and used vouchers to attend higher performing private schools. At the very moment, he was giving his speech on how to fix America’s schools, Senate Democrats voted to effectively kill the DC voucher program and prevent more poor kids from fleeing failing schools.

Obama’s staff has hinted they’ll try to preserve the voucher program, at least for the kids already in it.

"I don't think it makes sense to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. "I think those kids need to stay in their school."

And Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that “it wouldn't make sense to disrupt the education of those that are in that system, and I think we'll work with Congress to ensure that a disruption like that doesn't take place.”

We’ll see if the administration follows through. Right now the president’s education plan is rife with inconsistencies. He is willing to spend more on Pell Grants (vouchers) for adults to attend college, but opposes them for children. He calls for professionalizing the teaching profession, yet effectively gives the unions huge amounts of new money to preserve the current rigid staffing models. He says the education system is failing, but wants that failing education system expanded to include universal preschool.

President Obama often talks about challenging the status quo. Education offers him the chance to do just that. Unfortunately, right now it looks like we’re just throwing more money at that status quo.

Full Column
Obama Can Help Michelle Rhee Fix DC's Schools

House Democrats Seek to End DC Voucher Program

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:11:00 EST

Last week the House Democrats passed a spending bill that would end the DC Scholarship program after the 2009-2010 school year. The Washington Post examines the Democrats real motives in defunding a tiny program that provides higher quality education choice for students in low-performing public schools during a time when spending billions is almost passe:

But the debate unfolding on Capitol Hill isn't about facts. It's about politics and the stranglehold the teachers unions have on the Democratic Party. Why else has so much time and effort gone into trying to kill off what, in the grand scheme of government spending, is a tiny program? Why wouldn't Congress want to get the results of a carefully calibrated scientific study before pulling the plug on a program that has proved to be enormously popular? Could the real fear be that school vouchers might actually be shown to be effective in leveling the academic playing field?

The bottom line is that this is a purely political. There is no solid academic or economic reason to kill the tiny school voucher program. The Democrats could easily leave those families alone. The only thing they have to lose is that the voucher program might actually provide the kids with a better education. The irony continues to be that none of those House Democrats or Obama would sacrifice their child's education to the future of the DC public school system.

As Alexander Russo reports at This Week in Education, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who oversees schools that are directley competing with the school voucher program, was the one Democrat still willing to stand up for parental choice.

“I don’t think vouchers are going to solve all the ills of public education, but parents who are zoned to schools that are failing kids should have options to do better by their kids.”

I wrote about the olden days when some Democrats were for Education Reform here.

Finally, I have to agree with Jay P. Greene today:

Vouchers have made the world safe for charters. And the moment that vouchers really do stall, the enemies of school choice will redirect their fire at charters, strangling them with regulation and repealing charter gains. To say that vouchers haven’t really done much of anything politically because charters are really where the action is to ignore how much charters owe their political strength to the credible threat of new and expanded voucher programs.

Oakland Charter Schools Outperform Other Public Schools in District

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 08:31:00 EST

Charter public schools in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) are outperforming their district public school peers at all grade levels, with high-poverty students, with English Language Learner (ELL) students and with ethnic minority students with the exception of whites, according to a new report released today by the California Charter Schools Association. The report also found that these gains are most prominent at the middle and high school levels, and that these gains are increasing over time.

Entitled, “A Longitudinal Analysis of Charter School Performance in Oakland Unified School District,” the report analyzed results from California’s Academic Performance Index (API) Growth results and also assessed, in the most detailed analysis to date, charter schools’ performance compared to their most “similarly-matched” Oakland district public schools that students would otherwise likely attend.

The report found that nearly seven in 10 charter schools (69 percent) on average outperformed their three most “similarly-matched” district schools on 2008 API Growth results.

The report also found that charter schools significantly outperformed district public schools in middle (836 to 624) and high schools (688 to 528) and slightly outperformed district schools at the elementary school level (725 to 705). Of the top ten highest-performing public schools in Oakland, all secondary schools were charter schools.

Oakland’s charter schools outperformed Oakland’s district public schools on behalf of Asian, African-American and Latino students, as well as ELL and high-poverty students while they slightly trailed in the performance of white students. Of all subgroups, charter schools most significantly outperformed among African-American and socioeconomically disadvantaged students (a gap of 77 and 76 points, respectively).

Read the full report here.

Obama Can Help Rhee Fix DC's Schools

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST

One of the hot items for kids this Christmas is the "Imagine Teacher" game for Nintendo DS, where kids role play as teachers. The goal of the game is to build up the enrollment of a new school based on your performance as a teacher. As the game's description explains: "At the beginning your class only has a few kids because most of the kids in town are used to going to a school located in the next town over. It is your job to bring those students back to make your classroom and school the best place to learn."

The game's designers have taken a page from Michelle Rhee's playbook. The DC school chancellor's education philosophy stresses the value of teacher talent and results over tenure. As a recent Time magazine profile explained, Rhee has "a relentless focus on finding--and rewarding--strong teachers, purging incompetent ones and weakening the tenure system that keeps bad teachers in the classroom."

Ms. Rhee has proposed an innovative teacher contract to let DC's teachers choose between two pay scales. They could get massive raises, earning up to $130,000 a year, if they take merit pay and give up tenure for one year, which would make it easier for Rhee to fire bad teachers. Or they could keep tenure and earn much less money. To date, the local union has refused to let teachers vote on Rhee's proposal.

"Tenure is the holy grail of teacher unions," Rhee told The New York Times. "But has no educational value for kids; it only benefits adults."

Michelle Rhee is not alone. In New York, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has revitalized the way teachers are hired by implementing an "open market" hiring system. New York ended "force placing" practices that required principals to hire available teachers even if they weren't qualified or a good fit for that school. Now principals have the authority to pick the teachers who are the best suited for their schools and needs.

There are a handful of urban school leaders across the country trying to improve our schools and revolutionize the teaching profession by making higher teacher quality the cornerstone of education reform in America. These leaders are urging a shift in labor practices to attract better teachers. They want to give teachers more pay, flexibility and fewer bureaucratic rules. They want teachers rewarded for the student outcomes they produce, not for holding advanced college degrees. The goal is to liberate teachers by exchanging today's prescriptive work rules and automatic tenure for more flexibility to innovate in their classrooms, higher salaries and advancement opportunities that are based on whether or not their students are actually learning and improving.

A December report from the Center for American Progress demonstrates why teacher quality is so crucial, especially for high-poverty students. The study found that students with a teacher in the top quartile of the talent pool achieve are getting the equivalent of an extra two or three months of instruction per year, compared with kids who have a teacher in the bottom 25 percent. They concluded that consistent exposure to high-quality teachers substantially lowers the barriers to academic success imposed by poverty and that teacher quality is much more important than oft-talked about reforms like class size.

President-elect Barack Obama should join the fight for good teachers. During the campaign he stressed merit pay for teachers. The current tenure system doesn't reward teachers based on results, just seniority and years in the classroom. It is time to stop rewarding poor teachers for time-served.

In the recent Time cover story, Rhee suggested the incoming Obama administration could make a big difference in her battle with the union over teacher quality, saying, "It would send a huge message if this administration actually took a side on where we are with union negotiations here."

Obama has called Rhee a "wonderful new superintendent." And he has the opportunity to help her change the direction of our failing public schools.

This Christmas kids are asking their parents to buy the "Imagine Teacher" video game. But parents shouldn't have to imagine the day when good teachers are rewarded and bad teachers are fired. It's time for the education establishment to put the interests of students first.

Scrap NCLB? No

info@reason.org (Erin Dillon) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:16:00 EST

Many school choice supporters were deeply disappointed when the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2001. Instead of embracing market-based reforms, President Bush joined with Democrats like Sen.Ted Kennedy to enact a top-down law that greatly expanded the federal role in education but did not emphasize school choice.

To add insult to injury, the one specifically choice-related reform in NCLB—allowing students in low-performing schools to transfer to another, higher-performing traditional public or public charter school in the same district — has not been working very well. A meager 2 percent of eligible students—or students stuck in schools identified as "in need of improvement"—took advantage of this option in the 2005–06 school year—and that's after rounding up.

But contrary to the claims of many school choice proponents, mandating more choice under No Child Left Behind is not going to help. Nor will getting rid of the law altogether as many of them recommend. Instead, the best way to set the stage for school choice is to use NCLB as a tool to arm parents with information on school performance and to create an adequate supply of quality school options in the neighborhoods that need them.

For markets to work, they need three things: information, demand, and supply. The demand for high-quality schools is undeniable. The long waiting lists for charter schools, even those that are not very good, demonstrate the desperate need for alternatives in areas with few or no high-performing schools. What school choice currently lacks is information and supply. And NCLB can play a pivotal role in filling both of these deficits.

No Child Left Behind has arguably had the biggest positive impact in providing parents and the general public with more, and better, data on school performance. NCLB requires that states report detailed information on school performance and disaggregate the data by multiple student subgroups, including minority student groups and disabled students. This requirement greatly expands the data available on school performance and directs attention to the gaps in achievement between different racial groups and between low and high income students—gaps that are obscured by school-wide averages. But NCLB needs to do more to help states move from just reporting data to providing parents with meaningful information.

First, Congress needs to reform NCLB's method of holding schools accountable. This method currently depends on measuring a school's "adequate yearly progress," or "AYP." It is intended to summarize a school's performance into one indicator of whether the school, and each subgroup within the school, is meeting state performance targets. NCLB requires schools to raise the percentage of kids every year who are proficient in math and reading before these schools can be deemed as having made adequate progress. Every school's AYP benchmark is raised annually to ensure that 100 percent of students are proficient in both reading and math by 2014.

Theoretically, a school's AYP status should give parents information about both the school's overall performance and the performance of student subgroups. But states have used a series of loopholes to water down what it means to "make" AYP, rendering it essentially meaningless and nearly impossible to use as a tool to compare one school against another. States, for example, have established large minimum subgroup sizes—up to 100 in California—meaning that many schools will not be held accountable for the performance of smaller groups, often special education students or students who are learning English. They have also diluted the standards of proficiency. This essentially circumvents NCLB's requirement that schools be held accountable for student performance both overall and in each subgroup.

As Congress considers NCLB's reauthorization, it should, first, close the loopholes states currently exploit to undermine AYP and ensure that any state requests for changes to its AYP goals are carefully considered before approval.

Second, in order to make meaningful data available to parents to evaluate schools, Congress needs to include start-up funding in NCLB for states to build longitudinal data systems that track individual student performance from one grade to the next. These systems provide the most accurate information on school performance and allow states to establish growth models to measure the progress of individual students over time – as opposed to simply tracking group progress. Above all, these models ensure that schools are educating students at both the high and low ends of the academic performance spectrum. In short, these data provide all parents with the information they need to make good school choices.

Getting rid of NCLB would diminish the incentive for states to invest in this consumer-friendly information. The slow pace of data system development at the state-level prior to NCLB is an indication of what would happen if federal pressure, and funding, for this information were removed.

But information is only one third of the formula for an effective education market—to complete this formula, we need to build the supply of high-quality schools, particularly in communities desperate for better options.

This is where NCLB has done the least to date. But the answer to this problem is not to eliminate NCLB since it offers us the only tool we currently have to identify low-performing schools in the first place. NCLB established the principle that consistently low-performing schools need to be reconstituted. This creates an incentive for districts to try new reform mechanisms, such as bringing in private education providers. Michelle Rhee, the new chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., for example, recently proposed asking charter school operators with an established record of success in urban schools to take over 27 public schools identified as "needing improvement" under NCLB.

This type of reform would not be possible without a mechanism to identify the schools that need help. But NCLB can do more to ensure that the reforms that schools undertake are effective by focusing on student outcomes. Currently, when a school is identified for reform, NCLB allows the school or district to select from a menu of reform options and that's the end of the reform process. It does not follow up to see if the reforms are actually working. Congress should establish clear expectations as to what benchmarks schools have to meet to demonstrate progress, while also allowing states and schools the flexibility to determine the most effective reform strategies.

A common argument against providing support under NCLB to so-called "failing" schools for reform efforts is that, by giving these schools more resources, NCLB is essentially rewarding failure. But NCLB can tie extra aid to schools that embrace outcome-based reforms and then produce results. This will create more quality schools in communities. Once more quality schools become available, school choice plans, either through NCLB or through the state, are more likely to be effective.

Some choice proponents suggest that a quick solution to the supply problem is to allow students to attend existing private schools through a voucher program instead of building supply among public schools. But this is unrealistic: The capacity simply doesn't exist in the private sector to absorb enough students from low-performing schools—private schools currently enroll only slightly more than 10 percent of all students, many of whom are not low-income students. And, as demonstrated by the recent rejection of the voucher program in Utah, adding vouchers, easily the most controversial form of school choice, to the federal education agenda would slow any school choice efforts under NCLB to a halt by introducing a new and powerful target for criticism. Instead of spending time and effort bringing in successful providers willing to operate and build quality among existing public schools, resources would be spent in an uphill political battle.

A similar capacity problem exists with proposals to expand public school choice across school district boundaries—a popular plan for addressing the lack of quality school choices in low-performing school districts. Even with a lot of carrots, it is unlikely that NCLB could encourage a significant number of districts to participate in inter-district choice. The districts that would be sending students would see a decline in enrollments and a subsequent decline in funding, and districts that would receive these students are often resistant to accepting students who might be disruptive or cause school test scores to decline. It is unclear whether expanding inter-district choice would dramatically increase participation in the public school choice initiative anyway. The demand, it seems, is for a good school in your own neighborhood, not in someone else's.

NCLB – or the federal government -- can't reform schools. That work needs to be done by the schools and districts themselves. But NCLB can apply the top-down pressure and generate information on school performance necessary to stimulate real changes in schools and districts. Throwing the law out completely would move us back into the dark ages on school performance. In order to have a functioning education marketplace, parents and students—consumers—need access to information about schools.

And before we can have a next-generation school system with a broader range of options, we need to invest in building high-quality schools in communities that currently don't have them. This is the only way to establish a choice-based school system that also preserves the public accountability and commitment to equity that are critical to the United States' public education system.

The Constitution Left Behind

info@reason.org (Andrew Coulson) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:13:00 EST

The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act is a legal, practical and strategic mistake. It transgresses limits on federal power enshrined in the Constitution; is inherently incapable of delivering on its promises; wastes staggering amounts of money that could be helping to educate children; and distracts attention from genuine market reforms that would actually accomplish its goals.

For those in doubt on the constitutional question, here is a quote from the book History of the Formation of the Union under the Constitution:

This Q&A rests squarely on the Tenth Amendment, which reserves for the states and the people powers not expressly enumerated and delegated to Congress by the Constitution. It was published by the federal government in 1943, under the oversight of the president, the vice president, and the speaker of the House. 1943. That means, not even the hyper-activist administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt believed that Congress had a mandate to make K-12 education policy for the nation.

But that was then.

Congress began testing the education policy waters with the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which funded math and science curriculum development programs during the post-Sputnik hysteria of the time. It then jumped into the education business with both feet with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 – of which NCLB is the latest reauthorization.

It is true that the Supreme Court has gone along with this federal power grab every step of the way. That doesn't make it right. Most Americans now agree, for example, that the "separate but equal" doctrine established by the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling was a travesty. Nevertheless, it was accepted jurisprudence for 60 years. Similarly, existing laws violating the Tenth Amendment don't make more such laws any more constitutional.

Of course conservative supporters of federal intervention in education have their own take on the Tenth Amendment. They think it should be ignored. No less illustrious a duo than former education secretaries William Bennett and Roderick Paige have characterized the views expressed in the preceding paragraphs as a "naïve commitment to states' rights." Perhaps that's the sort of trenchant constitutional analysis they would mandate that children be taught in their federally-controlled schools.

Even if NCLB were constitutional, and even if it substantively expanded school choice in the short term, it would remain a bad idea. As I have argued elsewhere, federal school choice measures that involve Uncle Sam handing out vouchers would likely result in the federal regulation of private schools, smothering the kind of real market activity that is necessary to make broadest possible choices available. I won't bother to rehash that argument here because NCLB does not in fact create meaningful school choice. As originally envisaged by President Bush, NCLB included a provision for students in failing public schools to receive vouchers for private school tuition. That provision was dropped from the initial drafts before the laser printers had stopped humming. What the law does require is that states offer students in failing schools the option of attending another public school. That is no more meaningful than the choice of colors that Henry Ford offered on his Model T ("any color you want, so long as it's black"). Public schools in most states are tightly constrained in the curricula they teach, the people they can hire, the salaries they can set, and the tests they administer. A "choice" of public schools is thus not a meaningful market choice.

NCLB also requires districts to provide free private tutoring services under certain circumstances. While private tutoring can indeed be helpful, only a tiny fraction of eligible students have participated – in many cases because public school districts have not done an effective job of publicizing this option and easing the sign-up process. We should be surprised?

Even if this provision were working as intended, it would still be a misapplication of economic and policy resources. The best that tutoring can do is to remediate some of the damage caused by ineffective instruction delivered during the regular school day. Simultaneously funding a grossly inefficient monopoly system and a limited market solution is unacceptably wasteful. It is the equivalent of a health care system that forced families to spend 90 percent of their medical budget on magic beans and feng shui, leaving them with 10 percent to pay for x-rays and antibiotics. Would that be good enough for your kids? There is a moral imperative to fix the K-12 system as a whole. Every dollar we waste on the current monopoly leaves a child less well educated.

And NCLB is indeed wasteful. Tens of billions of dollars over pre-existing federal spending levels have been thrown at the program, to no avail. As my colleague Neal McCluskey and I documented in our September NCLB report ("End it, Don't Mend it"), the best research on NLCB's academic effects indicates that it has not affected pre-existing trends in student achievement. Yes, scores on some National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests – widely regarded as the most reliable tests of student performance -- have ticked up a bit since NCLB was passed in 2002, but they had been slowly drifting upward since the 1990s, long before NCLB was a twinkle in the president's eye. What's more, these gradual increases have been occurring only at the 4th and, to a lesser extent, the 8th grades. High school seniors score no higher today than they did more than 30 years ago, so the recent upticks in some subjects in lower grades have been evaporating by the end of high school.

There is another approach to education that we know does work: free and competitive markets. Since I wrote a literature review on the subject in 2004, I have been maintaining a list of studies comparing the private and government provision of elementary and secondary education around the world, across six different outcomes: student academic achievement (measured by test scores), school efficiency (measured by student achievement per dollar spent), parental satisfaction, the orderliness of classrooms, the condition in which physical facilities are maintained, and the earnings of graduates. The 59 studies currently in that list report 80 separate statistically significant findings comparing public and private sector educational outcomes. Seventy-two of them favor private provision of education.

And while I haven't been keeping track of all the intersectoral comparisons of high school graduation rates and college acceptance/graduation rates, two studies I've come across in that field also favor the private sector (by Derek Neal of the University of Chicago, and Jay Greene, now at the University of Arkansas).

So NCLB is an ineffective and unconstitutional distraction from the sorts of true market policies that actually improve achievement, efficiency, graduation rates, social outcomes, and overall parental satisfaction -- policies such as education tax credits for personal use and for donations to private scholarship funds that serve low-income families. This combination of credits is an ideal means of providing universal access to a quality – yet diverse – education, as a forthcoming paper by the Cato Institute's Adam Schaeffer demonstrates.

NCLB's popularity among some conservatives stems mainly from wishful thinking and the idea that unconstitutional federal intrusions in the classroom are acceptable – so long as conservatives themselves are the intruders. But this is short-sighted. Given the current composition of Congress and the prospects for the next presidential election, conservatives will not likely be the ones charting the law's future. They have given the federal government a badly designed new weapon, loaded it, and handed it to the other party. The sooner that weapon is disassembled and disposed of, the better off American children will be.

No Child Left Behind Act: Keep it or Kill it?

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:10:00 EST

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) – one of the grandest initiatives of the Bush presidency -- is in trouble. Few outside the small band of Bush administration brothers – and sisters – believe that the law is even remotely close to achieving its goals. Its reauthorization is stalled in Congress and the big debate right now is whether it should be scrapped altogether – or seriously reformed.

That is in sharp contrast to the mood five years ago when NCLB was passed. Both liberals and conservatives enthusiastically supported the law at the time, albeit for entirely different reasons. Liberals saw in it great promise to eradicate long-standing inequities and close the persistent achievement gap between poor, minority kids and rich, white ones. Conservatives, on the other hand, saw the act as a vehicle to reform the dysfunctional public school K-12 monopoly and improve the overall quality of education.

To accomplish all these remarkable goals, the act did two things: One, it substantially boosted spending on Title 1 – the main source of federal funding for schools. Title 1 is part of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act that President Lyndon Johnson signed into law to help states cope with the cost of educating poor and at-risk kids. Since 2002 No Child Left Behind was approved, Title 1 spending has gone up by about 40 percent and currently stands at about $23.5 billion. (Federal K-12 spending is a little over 8 percent of the total K-12 spending in the country.)

And two, as a condition of receiving federal money, states had to commit to annually testing the reading and math skills of all kids from 3rd to 8th grades and report the results by race, income, disability and a number of other categories. An ever rising percentage of kids in each sub-group had to test "proficient" in both subjects every year – with 100 percent kids achieving proficiency by 2014. States also had to pledge to "reform" schools that missed their targets a few years in a row – or risk losing their federal dollars.

The hope of liberals was that disaggregating the testing data would expose achievement gaps between the advantaged and disadvantaged kids and shame states into redoubling their efforts to educate lagging groups. And conservatives hoped that, even though the act did not directly attach federal dollars to the backpacks of kids to take to whichever school they wanted to, the requirement that persistently failing schools give kids an option to transfer to another public/charter school or pay for extra tutoring, would be sufficient to inject some competition into the ossified public school monopoly.

None of this has happened.

According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, the most reliable gauge of student learning and widely regarded as the nation's report card, in 2002, when NCLB went into effect, 13 percent of the nation's black 8th grade students were proficient in reading – meaning reading at grade level. By 2005 that number had dropped to 12 percent. The reading proficiency of white 8th graders dropped by two points too. The only bright spot was in the math proficiency of 4th graders, where black proficiency rates went up from 5 percent in 2000 to 13 percent in 2005 and poor kids from 8 percent to 19 percent. But this is still far below the 47 percent proficiency rate for whites in 2005 – and way below the 100 percent proficiency goal for all by 2014.

The choice component of the act has proven to be too weak to trigger broader school reforms, both contributors to this Reason Roundtable agree. Erin Dillon, a policy analyst at Education Sector, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, points out that five years after NCLB, a meager 2 percent of kids have exercised the option of transferring out of low performing schools, largely because of the lack of availability of better schools. Meanwhile, Andrew Coulson, the director of education policy at the free market CATO Institute in Washington D.C. , points out that only a tiny fraction of eligible kids have availed of the private tutoring option, mainly because schools don't even tell parents about it.

Still, Dillon believes that the No Child Left Behind has played a valuable – if imperfect -- role in putting information about school performance in the hands of parents. She writes, "Throwing it out would move us back into the dark ages on school performance." What's more, this would be bad for the future of school choice, she argues, "In order to have a functioning education marketplace, parents and students—consumers—need access to information about schools."

Coulson completely disagrees. As far as he is concerned, the act can't be killed fast enough. It has expanded the role of federal government in education and subverted the principles of federalism. These principles are not just a matter of fidelity to the constitution – although they are certainly that. Innovative market reforms can happen only at the state – not federal – level and therefore it is essential that they be left free from the diktats of Uncle Sam. "NCLB is an ineffective and unconstitutional distraction from the sorts of true market policies that actually improve achievement, efficiency, graduation rates, social outcomes, and overall parental satisfaction," he writes.

No Choices Left Behind

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 18:00:00 EST

Executive Summary

The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires states to show that students in every subgroup, including minorities, low-income, and special education students are proficient in reading and math. In 2005, each subgroup in elementary and middle school had to have at least 24.4 percent of students proficient in reading and 26.5 percent proficient in math. In high school each subgroup needs 22.3 percent of students proficient in reading and 20.9 percent of students proficient in math.

A total of 2,215 schools are listed as “needs improvement” under NCLB and have entered program improvement status in California. Of these, 355 have been chronically low-performing for more than five years. Process improvements such as class size reductions, bigger budgets, or threatened sanctions have failed to address the problem.

California needs school improvement legislation requiring schools with five or more years of failure to choose a competitive model that offers students meaningful alternatives to the current low-performing public school including:

offering opportunity scholarships to students in failing schools;
competitively bidding out low-performing schools to outside operators;
restructuring the district to a weighted student formula system where a student could choose any school in the district, or
converting the low-performing school to a charter school.

Students need the right of exit from these low-performing schools. School funding needs to be put into the backpacks of children and follow them into the school of their choice. Offering parents and students “buying power” will help inspire excellence in low-performing schools if they have to compete for students in order to receive funding.

The weighted student formula is a simple and equitable per-pupil funding system that allows money to follow each child. This reform wins out over other competitive reforms because it allows California to develop a stable school funding stream and would put every school provider— whether public, charter, or private—on a level playing field in California.

How Schools Underreport Violence, Cheat No Child Left Behind

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Reason magazine June 2005 Print Edition

On March 17, 2005, 15-year-old Delusa Allen was shot in the head while leaving Locke High School in Los Angeles, sending her into intensive care and eventually killing her. Four months before that several kids were injured in a riot at the same school, and last year the district had to settle a lawsuit by a student who required eye surgery after he was beaten there. In 2000, 17-year-old Deangelo Anderson was shot just across the street from Locke; he lay dead on the sidewalk for hours before the coroner came to collect his body.

Violent crime is common at Locke. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, in the 2003-04 school year its students suffered three sex offenses, 17 robberies, 25 batteries, and 11 assaults with a deadly weapon. And that's actually an improvement over some past years: In 2000-01 the school had 13 sex offenses, 43 robberies, 57 batteries, and 19 assaults with a deadly weapon.

Sounds unsafe, doesn't it? Not in the skewed world of official education statistics. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, states are supposed to designate hazardous schools as "persistently dangerous" and allow their students to transfer to safer institutions. But despite Locke's grim record, the state didn't think it qualified for the label.

Locke is not unique. In the 2003-04 school year only 26 of the nation's 91,000 public schools were labeled persistently dangerous. Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia proudly reported that they were home to not a single unsafe school. That would be news to the parents of James Richardson, a 17-year-old football player at Ballou Senior High in Southeast Washington, D.C., who was shot inside the school that very year. It would be news to quite a few people: The D.C. Office of the Inspector General reports that during that school year there were more than 1,700 "serious security incidents" in city schools, including 464 weapons offenses.

Most American schools are fairly safe, it's true, and the overall risk of being killed in one is less than one in 1.7 million. The data show a general decline in violence in American public schools: The National Center for Education Statistics' 2004 Indicators of School Crime and Safety shows that the crime victimization rate has been cut in half, declining from 48 violent victimizations per 1,000 students in 1992 to 24 in 2002, the last year for which there are complete statistics.

But that doesn't mean there has been a decline at every school. Most of the violence is concentrated in a few institutions. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 1999-2000 school year 2 percent of U.S. schools (1,600) accounted for about 50 percent of serious violent incidents--and 7 percent of public schools (5,400) accounted for 75 percent of serious violent incidents. The "persistently dangerous" label exists to identify such institutions.

So why are only 26 schools in the country tagged with it?

The underreporting of dangerous schools is only a subset of a larger problem. The amount of information about schools presented to the general public is at an all-time high, but the information isn't always useful or accurate.

Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, now three years old, parents are seeing more and more data about school performance. Each school now has to give itself an annual report card, with assessment results broken down by poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, and English-language proficiency. Schools also are supposed to accurately and completely report dropout rates and teacher qualifications. The quest for more and better information about school performance has been used as a justification to increase education spending at the local, state, and national levels, with the federal Department of Education alone jacking up spending to nearly $60 billion for fiscal year 2005, up more than $7 billion since 2003.

But while federal and state legislators congratulate themselves for their newfound focus on school accountability, scant attention is being paid to the quality of the data they're using. Whether the topic is violence, test scores, or dropout rates, school officials have found myriad methods to paint a prettier picture of their performance. These distortions hide the extent of schools' failures, deceive taxpayers about what our ever-increasing education budgets are buying, and keep kids locked in failing institutions. Meanwhile, Washington--which has set national standards requiring 100 percent of school children to reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014--has been complicit in letting states avoid sanctions by fiddling with their definitions of proficiency.

The federal government is spending billions to improve student achievement while simultaneously granting states license to game the system. As a result, schools have learned to lie with statistics.

Prospering Cheaters

Under No Child Left Behind, if schools fail to make adequate yearly progress on state tests for three consecutive years, students can use federal funds to transfer to higher-performing public or private schools, or to obtain supplemental education services from providers of their choice. In addition, schools that fail for four to five consecutive years may face state takeovers, have their staffs replaced, or be bid out to private management.

Wesley Elementary in Houston isn't a school you'd expect to be worried about those threats. From 1994 to 2003, Wesley won national accolades for teaching a majority of its low-income students how to read. Oprah Winfrey once featured it in a special segment on schools that "defy the odds," and in 2002 the Broad Foundation awarded the Houston Independent School District a $1 million prize for being the best urban school district in America, largely based on the performance of schools like Wesley.

It turned out that Oprah was righter than she realized: Wesley was defying the odds. A December 31, 2004, expos� by The Dallas Morning News found that in 2003 Wesley's fifth-graders performed in the top 10 percent in the state on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) reading exams. The very next year, as sixth-graders at Houston's M.C. Williams Middle School, the same students fell to the bottom 10 percent.

The newspaper obtained raw testing data for 7,700 Texas public schools for 2003 and 2004. It found severe statistical anomalies in nearly 400 of them. The Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth districts are now investigating dozens of their schools for possible cheating on the TAKS test. Fort Worth's most suspicious case was at A.M. Pate Elementary. In 2004, Pate fifth-graders finished in the top 5 percent of Texas students. In 2003, when those same students were fourth-graders, they had finished in the bottom 3 percent.

In the Winter 2004 issue of Education Next, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and Brian A. Jacob of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government explored the prevalence of cheating in public schools. Using data on test scores and student records from the Chicago public schools, Jacob and Levitt developed a statistical algorithm to identify classrooms where cheating was suspected. Their sample included all student test scores in grades 3-7 for the years 1993 to 2000. The final data set contained more than 40,000 "classroom years" of data and more than 700,000 "student year" observations. Jacob and Levitt's analysis looked for unexpected fluctuations in students' test scores and unusual patterns of answers for students within a classroom that might indicate skullduggery.

They found that on any given test the scores of students in 3 percent to 6 percent of classrooms are doctored by teachers or administrators. They also found some evidence of a correlation of cheating within schools, suggesting some centralized effort by a counselor, test coordinator, or principal. Jacob and Levitt argue that with the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, the incentives for teachers and administrators to manipulate the results from high-stakes tests will increase as schools begin to feel the consequences of low scores.

Texas' widespread cheating likely was a response both to high-stakes testing and to financial incentives for raising test scores. The Houston school district, for example, spends more than $7 million a year on performance bonuses that are largely tied to test scores. Those bonuses include up to $800 for teachers, $5,000 for principals, and $20,000 for higher-level administrators.

Texas is not the only state where schools have cheated on standardized tests. Teachers provided testing materials to students nearly a dozen times in 2003 in Nevada, for example. And Indiana has seen a raft of problems, including three Gary schools that were stripped of their accreditation in 2002 after hundreds of 10th-graders received answers for the Indiana Statewide Testing for Education Progress-Plus in advance. A teacher in Fort Wayne took a somewhat subtler approach in 2004, when school officials had to throw out her third-grade class's scores after she gave away answers by emphasizing certain words on oral test questions. In January 2005 another Fort Wayne third-grade teacher was suspended for tapping children on the shoulder to indicate a wrong answer.

Phantom Dropouts

If you want to make a school's performance look more impressive than it really is, you don't have to abet cheating on standardized tests. Instead you can misrepresent the dropout rate.

In 2003 The New York Times described an egregious example of this scam in Houston. Jerroll Tyler was severely truant from Houston's Sharpstown High School. When he showed up to take a math exam required for graduation, he was told he was no longer enrolled. He never returned.

So Tyler was surprised to learn, when the state audited his high school, that Sharpstown High had zero dropouts in 2002. According to the state audit of Houston's dropout data, Sharpstown reported that Tyler had enrolled in a charter school--an institution he had never visited, much less attended. The 2003 state audit of the Houston district examined records from 16 middle and high schools, and found that more than half of the 5,500 students who left in the 2002 school year should have been declared dropouts but were not.

The Manhattan Institute's Jay P. Greene argues, in his 2004 paper "Public School Graduation Rates in the United States," that "this problem is neither recent nor confined to the Houston school district....Official graduation rates going back many years have been highly misleading in New York City, Dallas, the state of California, the state of Washington, several Ohio school districts, and many other jurisdictions." Administrators, he explains, have strong incentives to count students who leave as anything other than dropouts. Next to test scores, graduation rates are an important measure of a school's performance: If parents and policy makers believe a school is producing a high number of graduates, they may not think reform is necessary. Greene writes that "when information on a student is ambiguous or missing, school and government officials are inclined to say that students moved away rather than say that they dropped out."

Greene and his associates have devised a more accurate method for calculating graduation rates. Simplifying a bit, it essentially counts the number of students enrolled in the ninth grade in a particular school or jurisdiction, makes adjustments for changes in the student population, and then counts the number of diplomas awarded when those same students leave high school. The percentage of original students who receive a diploma is the true graduation rate.

Using Greene's methodology, the national high school graduation rate for 2002 was 71 percent. Yet according to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2002 the national high school "completion rate," defined as the percentage of adults 25 and older who had completed high school, was 85 percent. As Greene notes, "There were a total of 3,852,077 public school ninth-graders during the 1998-99 school year. In 2001-02, when that class was graduating, only 2,632,182 regular high school diplomas were distributed. Simply dividing these numbers produces a (very rough) graduation rate estimate of 68%." The states show similar discrepancies between their reported graduation rates and the number of students who actually receive diplomas.

As Sharpstown High School's former assistant principal, Robert Kimball, told The New York Times, "We go from 1,000 Freshman [sic] to less than 300 Seniors with no dropouts. Amazing!"

The problem isn't limited to Texas. In March researchers at Harvard's Civil Rights Project released an analysis of state graduation rates for 2002, in which they derived their figures by counting the number of students who move from one grade to the next and then on to graduation. The report found serious discrepancies between the rates calculated by the Civil Rights Project and those offered by education departments in all 50 states. In California, for example, the state reported an 83 percent graduation rate, but the Harvard report found that only 71 percent of students made it through high school.

The Civil Rights Project's paper also found a high dropout rate among minorities, which California officials hides behind state averages. Almost half of the Latino and African-American students who should have graduated from California high schools in 2002 failed to complete their education. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, just 39 percent of Latinos and 47 percent of African Americans graduated, compared with 67 percent of whites and 77 percent of Asians.

Moving the Goalposts on Proficiency

A subtler way to distort data is to report test scores as increasing when in fact more students have been excluded from taking the test. One egregious example of this practice took place in Florida, which grades schools from F to A based on their standardized test scores. Oak Ridge High School in Orlando boosted its test scores from an F to a D in 2004 after purging its attendance rolls of 126 low-performing students.

The students were cut from school enrollment records without their parents' permission, a violation of state law. According to the Orlando Sentinel, about three-quarters of the students had at least one F in their classes, and 80 percent were ninth- or 10th-graders--a key group, because Florida counts only the scores of freshmen and sophomores for school grades. More than half of the students returned to Oak Ridge a few weeks after state testing.

The Sentinel also reported that in 2004 some 160 Florida schools assigned students to new schools just before standardized testing in a shell game to raise school grades. In Polk County, for example, 70 percent of the students who were reassigned to new schools scored poorly on Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test, suggesting they were moved to avoid giving their old schools a bad grade.

Florida is not alone. In a third of Houston's 30 high schools, scores on standardized exams have risen as enrollment has shrunk. At Austin High, for example, 2,757 students were enrolled in the 1997-98 school year, when only 65 percent passed the 10th-grade math test. Three years later, 99 percent of students passed the math exam, but enrollment had shrunk to 2,215 students. The school also reported that dropout figures had plummeted from 4.1 percent to 0.3 percent. Rather than a sudden 20 percent drop in enrollment, the school had used a strategy of holding back low-scoring ninth-graders and then promoting them directly to 11th grade to avoid the 10th-grade exam.

States are also excluding a higher percentage of disabled students and students for whom English is a second language. (Needless to say, these exclusion rates are not reported with the test score data.) And states often report that their test scores are going up when they've merely dumbed-down their standards by changing the percentage of correct responses necessary to be labeled "proficient" or by changing the content of the tests to make them easier. Of the 41 states that have reported their 2004 No Child Left Behind test results so far, 35--including all of the states showing improvement--had schools meet the targets not by improving the schools but by amending the rules that determine which schools pass and which fail.

For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported last October that Pennsylvania's "improvements" were a result of lower standards, not improved performance. These changes, approved by the federal government, allowed schools with lower graduation rates, lower standardized test scores, or lower attendance than in previous years to win passing marks. In 2004, 81 percent of the state's schools met No Child Left Behind's adequate yearly progress benchmarks using the new standards. But the Inquirer analysis found that if the same rules used in 2003 had been used in 2004, the number of schools falling short of the yearly benchmark would have grown from 566 to 1,164. Instead of 81 percent meeting the benchmark, just 61 percent would have succeeded. When the Pennsylvania Education Department announced in August that only 566 of 3,009 public schools failed to meet federal standards, it neglected to mention the role the rule changes played in the "significant gains" made.

This sort of thing has been going on for a while. Back in 2002 Education Week reported that "a number of states appear to be easing their standards for what it means to be 'proficient' in reading and math because of pressures to comply with a new federal law requiring states to make sure all students are proficient on state tests in those subjects within 12 years. In Louisiana, for instance, students will be considered proficient for purposes of the federal law when they score at the 'basic' achievement level on their state's assessment. Connecticut schoolchildren will be deemed proficient even if they fall shy of the state's performance goals in reading and mathematics. And Colorado students who score in the 'partially proficient' level on their state test will be judged proficient."

The federal government actually gives a seal of approval to states that are lowering the standards they had before Bush's era of "accountability." For example, the U.S. Department of Education allowed Washington state to lower its high school graduation rate from 73 percent to 66 percent and still meet No Child Left Behind requirements--with the promise of an 85 percent graduation rate by 2014. Apparently, the feds are spending billions to compel states to reduce their academic standards.

Lying by Omission

But the most common way school data deceive people is through omission. State and local education officials simply do not define their terms for the media or the general public. As we've already seen, "persistently dangerous" doesn't mean the same thing to officials that it means to you and me.

Another example: My local newspaper lists area schools that have met No Child Left Behind goals and are compliant with federal law. The article will tell you that every subgroup, from low-income children and Hispanics to special education children, is proficient in reading and in math. It will not say that in California, in order for yearly progress for each subgroup to be considered adequate, only 13 percent of the children in each group must be proficient. Imagine the difference--and how much more helpful it would be to a concerned parent trying to decide what is best for her child--if the newspaper article said, "Here is a list of schools where at least 13 percent of children in each group are proficient."

The newspaper should also explain what it really means to be "proficient" in reading. To be considered proficient for the third grade in California, you must score at the 51st percentile in reading and the 63rd percentile in math on California's standardized STAR test. In other words, all it really means when my school is listed as meeting "adequate yearly progress" under No Child Left Behind is that at least 13 percent of third-graders in every subgroup scored at the 51st percentile on the reading test.

Most parents assume that "proficiency" means grade-level performance. But proficiency standards are so different from state to state that students with the same skills will have very different proficiency rates. In third-grade reading, for example, Texas sets its cut score--the correct number of responses or percentile ranking a student needs to be considered proficient--at the 13th percentile. Nevada sets its cut score at the 58th percentile.

All this only scratches the surface of the ways schools use statistics to mislead parents and the public. From reporting teachers' salaries without including benefits as part of their compensation to reporting per-pupil spending while excluding billions in spending on school buildings and infrastructure, the list of deceptions goes on and on.

The No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to let parents and policy makers identify and fix failing schools. More important, it was supposed to give kids a right of exit out of failing or dangerous institutions. But that's meaningless if "failing" and "dangerous" can be defined away. Despite the violence at Locke High School, the teaching failures at Wesley Elementary School, and the high dropout rates at Sharpstown High School, the average kid in those institutions is no closer to escaping now than before the law was passed. And despite the glut of information being offered to parents--and the glut of dollars being spent on education--most families rarely see the facts about their schools' performance.

No Child Left Behind was sold as a way to make the schools more accountable. Instead, it has encouraged and abetted them as they distort the data and game the system. That may be the worst deception of all.

Lisa Snell is director of education at Reason Foundation.

School Violence and No Child Left Behind

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 18:00:00 EST

Executive Summary

Most schools in the United States are relatively safe. Data on school crime points to a general decline in school violence in public schools in the past decade. The National Center for Education Statistics 2004 Indicators of School Crime and Safety provides the most recent data on school violence. This ongoing statistical survey has found that the crime victimization rate at school declined from 48 violent victimizations per 1,000 students in 1992 to 24 such victimizations in 2002.

While the general data show a decline in school violence, this is not true for every school. Reason Foundation recognizes the general decline in school violence, but we are most concerned with policies for those schools that still have a high rate of crime and incentives to underreport crime. It is critical that parents have information about which schools are safe and which schools have crime on campus.

Most school violence is concentrated in a few schools. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 1999-2000 school year 2 percent of schools (1,600) accounted for approximately 50 percent of serious violent incidents and 7 percent of public schools (5,400) accounted for 75 percent of serious violent incidents.

In the 2003-2004 school year, only 52 of the nation's 92,000 public schools were labeled "persistently dangerous" under the No Child Left Behind Act, entitling students to move to a designated “safe” school. Based on the small number of schools that were labeled as dangerous, in September 2003 the Education Reform Subcommittee held a field hearing in Denver, Colorado to study how states are implementing No Child Left Behind’s persistently dangerous schools provision. The hearing suggested some states are significantly underreporting the number of unsafe schools to sidestep the law’s requirements. Testimony from a National Center for Education Statistics expert revealed that in 2001, 6 percent of students reported they had carried a weapon on school property, and the same percentage feared being attacked at school. A year earlier, in 2000, students were victims of about 700,000 nonfatal violent crimes while on school property. However, only 0.0006 percent of the nation’s schools have been designated as “unsafe” by their states.

If most violence is concentrated in a few schools, parents need to be aware of which schools are violent or safe in order to make the best decisions about where to enroll their children. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, students enrolled in a "persistently dangerous school" have the right to transfer to a safer school in the district. Yet, evidence suggests that schools have unreasonable definitions of “dangerous,” underreport school crime, and do not provide parents with accurate information about school crime.

In a content analysis of 80 large school district Web sites including the member districts of The Great City Schools (which consists of most large urban school districts) and the 50 largest school districts as reported by the National Center for Education Statistics, 75 percent of large school districts have no school crime data at district- or state-level Web sites. However, a few school districts provide parents with detailed information at the school level on the specific incidents of school violence that would allow parents to evaluate the type of crime happening in their child’s school or potential school. Leading the way is Florida. Because of Florida’s state violent incident reporting system, parents can find information on school violence at every school in the state. Some districts provide aggregate school violence incidents for the entire district in annual reports or other documents, but most of the data are dated. Some districts like Sacramento, California and Albuquerque, New Mexico provide somewhat dated crime statistics at the school level for selected years though not in a database format. Only New York, Los Angeles, Florida and Pennsylvania provide searchable databases or spreadsheets with multiple years of school crime data and detailed reports by type of crime. The Florida and Pennsylvania state systems also provide data on charter schools.

Parents need more information on school violence and legislators should require school districts to provide parents with more information about the safety of their schools and more choices for smaller and safer schools. But beyond the mere reporting of violence is the curbing of it. In determining how to lessen school violence, we compared the effectiveness of various approaches suggested or practiced by schools or those who study schools. We offer several recommendations for improving the safety of public schools and providing parents with accurate information about school crime:

Revise the state and federal law to loosen or eliminate restrictions on school choice. The act of choosing and the related imperative for schools to make themselves “choice-worthy” is the key to any serious anti-violence policy. Forced assignment to schools and the resulting mismatches and detachment beget boredom and violence and create schools that are unresponsive to parental demands for safer schools.
Encourage smaller schools, competition, and new school capacity. Strong evidence points to the correlation between school size and school violence. Private and charter schools cater to parents’ demand for smaller schools. Legislation should require school districts to move away from school consolidation toward smaller schools.
Encourage legislators to provide school administrators with incentives to focus resources on a “broken windows” approach to preventing school violence. Cleaning up school facilities and getting tougher on smaller crimes help prevent more serious crimes.
Create uniform reporting standards. At the state level, and perhaps even the federal level, there should be consistent definitions for school violence incidents that make school crime data comparable across individual schools so parents can make informed decisions about the safety of their schools. Pennsylvania and Florida demonstrate the usefulness of consistent crime data across all schools in one state.
Follow federal guidelines for defining “persistently dangerous” schools. The federal government should require states to use more accurate definitions for dangerous schools and include all types of violent incidents including rape and assault.
Use school violence outcomes—not processes—as a measure of dangerous schools. Schools should use the actual incidents of crime and not the processes, such as expulsion or criminal prosecution, to judge the violence in a specific school. Measures of detentions, expulsions, or school transfers are not measures of school violence.
Make crime statistics part of school report cards. Crime data should be required as part of a school’s report card alongside academic data and teacher experience.
Report crime data in a timely fashion. Persistently dangerous schools should be labeled based on the previous school year’s data and that data should be reported to parents in a timely fashion.
Include similar schools’ rankings. Crime data reporting should include rankings of similar schools to help parents compare the violence level between schools.
Enforce the unsafe school choice option for student victims. Students who are the victims of school crime should immediately be allowed to transfer to a safer public school. If a safer public school is not available, the student should be provided with a school voucher to attend a private school.